Advocacy work by Wild Heritage and partners at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meetings in Egypt last month led to a crucial new decision by the CBD emphasizing the critical importance of primary forests. Specifically, the CBD now recognizes the “exceptional importance of primary forest for biodiversity conservation” and “the urgent necessity to avoid major fragmentation, damage and loss of primary forests of the planet“. This is the first time the CBD has had an explicit focus on primary forests – long overdue, but very welcome! Wild Heritage and partners also argued for highlighting the importance of ecosystem integrity, for both biodiversity conservation and to fight climate change, and a number of references to ecosystem integrity were also adopted in CBD decisions. We’ll now work to carry this over to other UN Conventions, including the climate change convention and other policy fora.
